The Pretty/Rich Theory

This one is fairly common, and I’m sure most of you have come to this conclusion as well.  To begin, I present the following argument:

It is based on the premise that in most modern cultures the main reason for choosing a mate, for both sexes, has shifted over the last century.  A hundred years ago it made sense for all people of money to marry money, thereby enhancing their families’ total wealth and position.  However, around that time it started to change, for half of us.

All of a sudden it wasn’t so important for men to marry into status, even if they had money.  Because there were so many people with money running around – it was the twenties, and you could marry whomever you damn-well liked.  It stood to reason, though, that because women weren’t really expected to work, that it was in their favour to marry someone who was rich, or likely to become rich (by virtue of being successful or inheriting).

Men, on the other hand, didn’t have to worry about their partners’ families’ money anymore, and so they started to tend more towards marrying women they found attractive.  This usually meant hot.  The end result was a generation (our parents, if you’re anywhere around generation X or Y) where you have wealthy families with hot moms, making hot babies.  The hotness is compounded if the hot children aren’t actually related to the ugly rich dad.

This tradition continues today, with a new generation of beautiful rich girls with greater access to the best beauticians, hairdressers, beauty products, clothes, and cosmetic surgery, if they want to go there.  They also will be under more pressure to look better, and to find a well-off husband.

So if you think she married you for your money, she probably did.

In a tangentially-related corner, a study recently showed that men are looking more or less the same as their ‘caveman ancestors’, but women are actually getting more attractive. They do say, however, that it’s a result of a shift in breeding strategies, which is what I started talking about in the first place. There is even some stuff about genes in there.

You get attractive lower and middle-class people as well, naturally, but I think that if anyone bothered to do a study they’d find that there is a disproportionate percentage of attractive women in the upper-middle to upper classes.  That, in a nutshell, is The Pretty/Rich Theory.

So where am I going with this? By extrapolating from there, and by assuming that a few things will stay more or less constant for the next fifty years or so, we can come to a prediction.  First, those things are that the primary ‘breeding strategies’ for both sexes will remain stable, and that we will still be using money in 2060.

Barring nuclear war or the discovery of free, clean energy and the abolition of wealth, chicks with enough of the good genes will always figure out at a young age that it’s more fun to hang out with guys who drive hot cars, than guys who have to borrow the Volvo.

As technology advances, and certain laws disappear, we will begin to see wide scale availability of genetic engineering.  As soon as it is legal it will be expensive, and initially targeted at removing birth defects and inherited diseases from infants.  But as time progresses and it gets cheaper to tinker with your genes, people will start to give their babies higher cheekbones, bolder chins, slimmer hips, and so on, attempting to approach an idealised beauty in one form or another.

These forms, as the freedom to alter the appearance of ones’ children grows, might diverge vastly from the norm, or rich people may end up all looking like Angelina Jolie.  Personally, I’d go more in this direction:

My point is that it will be available, but only at a cost – even late into our childrens’ lifetimes. But what good is only being able to change your kids’ genes?  People that concerned with beauty usually want a bit of it for themselves.  And that’s where nanotechnology comes in.

Now, I’m no expert, but there is every reason to believe that it will be possible in the future to build smart organic cells or nanobots that can course through the human body, altering selective DNA as they go. This would allow us to change our appearance over the course of a few days or weeks (probably not without risk).  It could also, in theory, allow us to live forever.

What this will mean is an increasing physical difference between the haves and the have-nots.  I’m not talking about Morlocks and Eloi here, just enough of a difference that you can tell if someone has the money or not.  The rest will remain homely for at least another century.

Your Host

Norman Conquest

You obviously haven’t seen this quote on your iGoogle page:

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wicked of men will do the most wicked of things for the greatest good of everyone” – John Maynard Keynes

Keynes was an economist.  Specifically, he was the economist, the one we blame for Keynesian economics, (adopted by the US to combat the great depression); something we’re seeing a bit more of these days. In the form of government bailouts.  Yes I know that’s not all there is to it.

He’s one of the people behind ‘capitalism’ as we know and love it today.  And he knew what he was talking about.

I like to use the following example borrowed from something called Game Theory, part of which describes how we act towards each other when resources are limited.

Consider a fishing community living on a large lake. The lake provides enough fish for the villagers, and some extra for them to sell and make a small profit.  However, the villagers are aware that if everyone keeps fishing as much as they like, soon there will be no fish, and that would be the worst possible outcome for everyone. Also, those who do not have the resources to catch a large number per day are disadvantaged right now.

So they agree to a quota: you are only allowed to take enough fish to feed your family, and as many again to sell, per day.  This sounds sensible, and if everyone abides by it the village will prosper.

However, people respond to incentives.  If everyone else is abiding by the rules, but I can break them and not get caught, my family will be more prosperous than the others.  So I break the rules.  But I’m not the only one this bright idea has occurred to.

If some people break the rules, others will be disadvantaged, and there will be an unequal sharing of wealth. The resource will also be depleted more rapidly.  If everyone breaks the rules, we’re back to square one, and soon everyone in the village will die or move off.  And if others are breaking the rules, there’s no incentive for me not to.

This is essentially what free-market Capitalism allows.  Of course, with regulation you can stop the scumbags from over-fishing the lake, but that becomes another problem.  How much freedom do you allow?

Now, I’m not a socialist.  I appreciate the finer things that my money can buy. But capitalism is not your friend. It exists by keeping the vast majority of the world’s population in economic bondage, through debt, as well as value and wage inequality.

If you have a professional or semi-professional degree, and a stable job with a good company, you are probably in the 97th percentile on the world income curve.  That means that 96% of the world earns less money than you. And unless you own large stretches of property in Dubai, and fly out on the weekends to play golf there, you probably aren’t in the 98th percentile. That’s how unequal it is.  It isn’t so obvious from this graphic (which is very old), but you get the idea.

World Income Distribution

Capitalism created this situation, and in my opinion it is impossible to fix without the drastic re-allocation of wealth, or the abolishment of debt-based currency altogether, neither of which are workable.  All of our money is created out of debt, or promises from the government.  The interest on this debt is repaid with your tax money.  It’s a very long route, but money created at the top, tends to stay at the top, with only debt trickling down.

(For information on a model for a resource-based economy instead, see The Venus Project)

The net effect of this is that we work our entire lives for companies which extract far more value from us than they return to us in the form of wages.  Think about it: if you make a product that is worth $10, and the company pays you $5 for your time $3 for materials and sells it for $10, who’s getting the better deal here?

Not you.  If you had the resources and ability you could make it for $3 and your time and sell it for $10, but you can’t. The company controls that power, so you have no choice but to sell your labour at a discount in return for a wage. You are creating more value than you are being paid for, unless you work for yourself.

This is the socialists’ gripe with capitalism, in a nutshell. On paper it is also a very valid argument. What confuses me are the numbers from the article ‘Quarter of People Say Capitalism Fatally Flawed‘ published on Reuters this morning.  Only a quarter? In fact, even more in the United States – even though the average American is in quite a lot of debt, and works a nine-to-five for less money than they’re ‘worth’.

Capitalism is not your friend.  It exists because people believe it is good for everyone to have free access to resources, if they have the money, which they can ‘earn’ through their hard work.  But that is the lie. It exists because of that last 2% of people. It exists because for every dollar you earn, they earn two, and they didn’t have to do any work for it.

Who are they?  They are the ones who have put themselves in a position to benefit from capitalism, not to serve it.  The ones who own the vast majority of the income-producing assets on the planet – and they could probably fit into a small town.

I’m not telling you to go out and get angry and protest outside the G20.  I’m telling you to have an informed opinion about how this money stuff works, because it is the leash used to control you.

If capitalism is only working for 2% of the population, and you’re not in it, why do you think it’s working?  Apparently 11-13% of those polled thought it was just fine, thanks. 27% thought it was fatally flawed and needed to be replaced, and the rest couldn’t give a shit.

This means that the vast majority of people support a system designed to control their lives and keep them from living to their full potential from the day they were born, to the day they die.  Retirement is no escape. As long as you need to think about where your next paycheck is coming from, you can never be free to pursue all that which makes you happy.

So tell me: why only a quarter?

Your Host

Norman Conquest

In the beginning there were the dinosaurs. They hunted or foraged during the day, for the most part, because even they could realise that at night they were more likely to bump into trees, rocks and eachother. Other than that they most probably saw little distinction between the times it was light and the times when it wasn’t. Then we came along.

Primitive man no doubt saw the difference between day and night. At daytime we could go outside of our caves, but at night it was dark, scary and cold. That’s when we made our first mistake. We distinguished between the two, and associated attributes to light and dark. The time when the sun was in the sky and we could wander around freely was essentially good, while night time became inherently bad.

This distinction was the most basic and profound mistake mankind would ever make, and it became the framework for how most of humankind would see the world, right until this day. Everything suddenly became divisible into one of two categories: good and evil. We constructed society, religion and the idea of nationhood around this one polarity, and it is our greatest weakness.

Ask yourself: have you ever met an “evil” person? I haven’t. I’ve met some thoroughly disagreeable people, and seen on TV those who are to be avoided in the interest of personal safety, but the distinction between good and evil is extremely difficult to quantify without coming up for a reason why your theory of what is “right” is wrong. More importantly, those qualities that we consider to be “good” are always internalised. We see ourselves as being in the “right”, and when something different from ourselves presents itself it is immediately seen as something else.

This sets up a polar relationship between “Us” being the good, righteous, freedom loving people of wherever, and “Them” the evil terrorists bent on the destruction of our way of life. This is extremely useful for a government. As George Bernard Shaw said: patriotism is the belief that your country is superior to all others by virtue of the fact that you were born in it. It is very easy to create a sense of national unity when there is a definite “enemy image” to cast that nation’s identity against.

National boundries, racial distinctions, class structures, even salary discrepancies are all arbitrary but very “real” differences (or rather, Derrida’s “Differance” that can be used to turn one group of people against another. This is why I say that “terrorists” are entirely constructed. There might be conflicting forces within a nation that have different ideologies, but these ideologies themselves are simply more arbitrary boundaries that people set up between themselves.

It is impossible for me to make you understand this unless you take it upon yourselves to actively dissolve millennia-old mental constructs. Why should you do this? Because then you will be able to see what our world has become.

More importantly, you will be able to see how unnecessary and just plain wrong most of the way our world has been depicted really is. When Bush or Cheyney stand up and say the word “Terrorism” a dozen times in a four minute speech, you will see a deliberate attempt at creating divisions and reinforcing the “Us against Them” dichotomy that keeps us all enslaved – instead of a rousing call to arms against what they would have us believe is a real enemy.

References:

Writing this article draws on many sources, some of which are reputable.  I am indebted, as always, to the masterful Peter Joseph’s Zeitgeist Movies (free download!), which don’t always contain the whole story, but show the fly the way out of the bottle.

Also, I regurgitate some of the work of Jacques Derrida, lovingly shoved down my throat by lecturers.  He is arguably the father of modern post-structuralism.

Lastly, there is a spattering of ideas from Edward Said and the philosopher, Hegel, without both of whom we might not know of the terrible things we do to one another in the name of our differences.

Your host

Norman Conquest